057. GAITIS Yannis (1923-1984)

‘Beast’ c1960s

Signed oil on canvas 95×75 cm

€ 5.000 – 6.000

This amazing work by Gaitis, from the “Beasts” series of the 1960s, exemplifies the artist’s exploration of abstract characteristics, intense shaping and linear acuity. It is a particularly tender work that negotiates a form that preoccupied him in many variations seeking his formal values to capture his own truth. The artist employs a spontaneous gesture and raw and quick brushwork as his basic material which he uses to capture a dynamic negotiation of the “beast.” He incorporates the form into a realm of a magical child’s world imbued with rhythm and play. The form is simplified losing its formal characteristics in order to renegotiate the painting from the beginning and to retain the essential. The dynamic rhythm and chromatic nobility combined with a childlike narrative, ironic naivety and subversive clumsiness imbue the hybrid creature which is simultaneously animal and anthropomorphic with a dynamism that enhances its capacity to make us think critically.